April 23, 2000

By FRANCINE PROSE

SHOPPING
By Gavin Kramer.
215 pp. New York:
Soho Press. $22.

n 1890, Lafcadio Hearn settled in Japan after a lifetime of restless, melancholy peregrination. Almost at once, the half-British, half-Greek writer felt as if he had come home. His diminutive size was suddenly within normal range, his eccentricities no longer freakish, merely foreign.

Alistair Meadowlark, the unfortunate hero of Gavin Kramer's clever first novel, ''Shopping,'' has quite the opposite experience when his law firm dispatches him to Asia. As stolidly British as the portrait of the queen that adorns the wall of his dreary Roppongi flat, the gawky, self-effacing lawyer is simply too tall for Tokyo. Not only is he perpetually bumping his head against the roofs of taxis, but his height alarms the young women who are otherwise only too delighted to meet lonely ''white men in suits.'' For in the neon-lighted neighborhoods that Kramer paints in all their lurid splendor, Madame Butterfly has long since morphed into the Material Girl, and the geishas have been effectively supplanted by acquisitive adolescents with a taste for raucous, smoky clubs and hushed, expensive boutiques.

Poor Meadowlark! The bigger they come, the harder they fall -- and the outsize lawyer falls hard for a self-involved schoolgirl named Sachiko, who has the appetite and the stamina to shop until any normal person would drop. Armed with her trusty mobile phone and pocket calculator, Sachiko leads the smitten Meadowlark on an expensive tour of shops where the consumer with broad tastes can buy ''Laura Ashley wallpaper, Charles Manson's life story, Thomas the Tank Engine calendars, Valentino handbags, ground rhino horn, alligator shoes, the translated lyrics of Jim Morrison, Impressionist reproductions, vibrating love eggs, Toshiba PC's, the collected works of Basho.'' Eventually, this protracted buying excursion becomes, for Meadowlark, a version of the river journey in Conrad's ''Heart of Darkness.''

The unnamed narrator who reports on our hero's dissolution is another British lawyer, who, unlike his alienated colleague, prides himself on his intimate knowledge of Japanese language and culture. He belongs to the braver, more romantic and self-regarding group of ''young professional expatriates,'' the ones who ''knew how to navigate the hot spring resorts and the ryokan, the traditional inns. . . . We liked to be seen in places where we were the sole white face. For that, we felt, was the only true gauge of authenticity.'' Kramer is very good on the tiny competitions through which expats establish dominance based on the extent to which they have gone native, and the subtext running beneath the surface of his novel concerns the myriad ways in which the Western fascination with Japan and the Japanese obsession with the West have turned the whole notion of authenticity into a ludicrous yet rather touching chimera.

Guided by his friend Bunji, a ''dapper anglophile'' student of Japanese architecture, the narrator ventures far beyond the bars where his compatriots chat up the racy, ambitious Japanese women they contemptuously call Yellow Cabs. Frequently accompanied by Bunji's younger sister and her classmate (the daughter of a notorious gangster), the two friends loll in the public baths at the Nikko hot springs, attend a freak show whose star performer purports to be half man, half Shetland pony and haunt a shabby quarter of the city that represents ''an older, more truculent Japan.'' Partly because of his eagerness to show how much he knows, Kramer's narrator makes a breezy, informative guide to the crowded subways and desolate suburbs, the soba shops and pachinko parlors, the rural antique shops, the popular McDonald's and the ''love hotels'' where rooms can be rented for stays of precisely two hours.

Kramer's vision and analysis of Japanese society are neither especially profound nor revelatory, but his book is a great deal of fun, and it's interesting to read about such cultural phenomena as manga, the telephone book-size comics that are the ''bastard offspring of the classical woodblock print,'' the capsule hotels where overworked salarymen bed down for the night in tubes barely large enough to shimmy into, and the ice-cream parlors where waitresses dressed as chambermaids serve customers amid prints of Monet and Renoir. Kramer has a sharp ear for the hilarious conversations that take place when the participants speak just enough of the same language to make themselves hopelessly misunderstood. His energy is infectious, and at times his writing is not merely breathless but exhilarating as he conveys the experience of ricocheting through the sensory overload of Tokyo. Consider, for example, this description of children returning home after a long, exhausting day:

''They would have been to school, then on to the juku, the night-time crammer, and after that would have aimlessly drifted, dawdling in cheap cafes and games arcades, too tired to do anything so decisive as going home. I'd often watched their contemporaries, the boys with their upright Teutonic collars, the girls in their sailor-like uniforms, sleeping, heads lolling, on late-night underground trains, sleeping like old people when barely 12, 14 years into their lives. There was so much to be learned, absorbed. And they'd only just begun.''

The highly charged prose style of ''Shopping'' can carry you, quite contentedly, through much of the book. It's not until the last third or so, when the plot spins out of control and begins to fall apart, that the reader -- as if waking from a pleasantly narcotized dream state -- finally notices that the characters lack the individuality and depth required to make fiction seem driven by psychological necessity rather than by the arbitrary, dogged application of the author's will. It's hard not to regret the missed opportunities, the additional layers, themes and threads that would have lent the novel additional resonance -- the difference it would have made if, for example, the narrator had been more of a self-aware personality and less of a cipher, a more complex and nuanced Nick Carraway to Meadowlark's goofy Gatsby.

Perhaps that's too much to ask, these days, of a first novel that certainly offers much more than the usual fare: those standard-issue teenage memoirs, thinly disguised as fiction and written in the cadences and vocabulary of a primary-school phonetics workbook. Gavin Kramer is talented. He can really write, and ''Shopping'' promises that -- in the near future, one hopes -- he will write a consistently satisfying novel.